Viktor “Isildur1” Blom Wins PCA High Roller Event

Monday, January 9th, 2012 by Ryan

It’s always interesting to see the well-known online poker pros take part in big live poker tournaments. While these players typically have a good knowledge of how to play the big live tournaments, it’s not too often that you find these players sitting in a heads-up match-up for the championship. This wasn’t quite the case for Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, who was up against 33 of the strongest combination of live and online poker players in the world, who entered into the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) High Roller event earlier this week. The event took place at the Atlantis Resort in the beautiful Bahamas, and featured a huge buy-in of $100k for each player, making quite the overall prize pool.

Blom is an interesting story, as he’s one of the more feared high stakes cash game online poker players in the world today, but he has a total of zero big live poker tournament wins. That all changed on Saturday when he was able to beat out big named tournament players like Jason Mercier and Jonathan Duhamel, and also popular all around players like Daniel Negreanu, Dan Shak, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Erik Seidel, and many other players. Blom’s win brought him a nice title win for his resume, but even more impressive was the first place prize that he took down of $1,254,400.

When the final day began, Blom was right in the middle of the final eight players remaining, and he didn’t make much noise until they were down to only five players, and in the money. This was the point when Blom turned it on, and actually eliminated each of the final four remaining players on his way to the championship win. The first eliminated was Daniel Negreanu in 5th place, followed by Jonathan Duhamel in 4th place, and Galen Hall in 3rd place. This set up the heads up match between Isildur and Dan Shak to decide who would take home the grand prize. Blom held onto his impressive run by controlling the heads up match, and sending Shak home in second.

The other three players who made it into the final day were Mike “Timex” McDonald, Humberto Brenes, and the bubble boy, Scott Seiver. Another point that was interesting about this event was that there was a rebuy option for players, which only two players took advantage of. The first was Bill Perkins, who did not make the cash, and the other was Duhamel, who ended up cashing for $313,600 in total.

The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure has quickly become one of the most talked about live poker tournament series’ out there today, and it is especially helpful that it is one of the first of the new year. Currently, the Main Event of the PCA is currently going on, and one name we mentioned above, Galen Hall, will be participating in that event with a chance to be able defend his title as the reigning PCA Main Event champion this past year. We’ll keep you updated on the outcome of the Main Event was time rolls on.